Broadcast television networks typically will insert commercials at strategic locations within as well as before and after television shows. Merchants that sponsor the ads continually look for new methods of attracting viewers to buy their products and services. It is extremely difficult for these sponsoring merchants to ascertain the effectiveness of their ads with respect to customer purchases. In other words, merchants cannot usually tell if a customer is making a purchase as a direct result of viewing an ad on television.
In addition, television program recording technologies have evolved to the point where many viewers will time-shift their viewing habits. That is, viewers will record a program and watch it at their leisure, employing controls over the program such as pause, rewind, and fast-forward. Although time shifting has been in practice since VCRs have become available to viewers, the practice has escalated in recent years due to the ease of digital recording and program control techniques popularized by the TIVO products and services. The result of the increased control that users have over their viewing is that many will skip over the commercials by fast forwarding. Some remote control devices has been made available with 30-second skip buttons that conveniently allow the viewer to press the button one or more times to easily skip the commercial. In addition, even if a viewer does not use time shifting techniques, there is no way of knowing if the viewer actually watches a commercial or leaves the viewing area to retrieve snacks or perform other tasks during the several minute commercial time span.
Thus, there is a desire in the art to provide a system that can give an incentive or reward for a viewer to watch a commercial (other than simply making the commercial artistically appealing). There is also a desire in the art to be able to measure the effectiveness of a commercial in terms of its ability to cause a viewer to make a purchase of a product or service of the sponsoring merchant.
In addition to providing an incentive for viewers to watch commercial advertisements, there is a desire by television stations and networks to increase viewership of its programs. That is, television networks continually look for ways to cause viewers to watch more programs on their networks (at the expense of watching shows on competing networks) and to be more loyal to the shows they watch (i.e. watch them regularly). Increased program viewership generally translates to increased commercial advertisement viewership, which will yield increased advertising revenue for the networks.
There is also a desire to provide a system and method for issuing an incentive to viewers, in the form for example of reward points, that may be maintained and tracked for each individual sponsor, yet may be part of a single overall program operated by the television broadcast network. By maintaining individual reward accounts for each sponsor (one of which may the network itself), data may be generated as to the effectiveness of each sponsor's advertisements and the like, and a participating viewer may build value with a particular sponsor by earning reward points from that sponsor. In addition, by providing the implementation under the umbrella of a single program operated by a single broadcast television network, advantages are gained such as increased viewership to the network (since rewards are available only via that network), as well as aggregation and combination of reward points from the different sponsors' programs if desired by a viewer in order to gain more purchasing power.
In addition to providing rewards to viewers as an incentive to watch a commercial, it is desired to be able to be able to collect data from the viewers that may be related to the commercial and/or programming content, in order to better tailor the marketing and advertising activities of the sponsor. For example, a car manufacturer may desire to collect data from the viewers of the programs that it sponsors that will provide insight as to the cars the viewers currently drive, their income level, how they spend their disposable income, etc. Thus, the present invention also provides for rewards in exchange for submission of personal data from the viewers that may be associated with the advertising content being viewed.
Similarly, it is desired to be able to assign a value to a consumer/viewer that is relevant to the sponsor's promotions, and then to generate and award rewards that are related to the value of that consumer.